A Miami Kingpin's Modern Turn

For years, billionaire developer Jorge Pérez built towers of glass and steel. Now he has decided to live in one

By

Robbie Whelan

Nov. 29, 2012 8:02 p.m. ET

Born in Argentina, Jorge Pérez, the son of a wealthy prescription-drug-company executive, moved to Cuba when he was 9 so his family could collect his grandfather's inheritance. When his father's pharmaceutical labs in Cuba were seized after the Communist government took over in 1959, the family fled to Colombia, where Mr. Pérez attended high school before moving to Miami in 1968.

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Mr. Pérez's home shows his earlier tastes for antique furniture and classic architecture. Alexia Fodere for The Wall Street Journal

Jorge Perez, a developer and art collector who built tens of thousands of condos in Miami during the go-go years, lives in a hacienda-style house stuffed to the gills with art on land that once belonged to Howard Hughes, in Miami's Coconut Grove. Robbie Whelan has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Alexia Fodere for The Wall Street Journal.

Today, Mr. Pérez is a 63-year-old billionaire real-estate developer and art collector. He has planted a forest of condo towers over the past few decades that have permanently altered the Miami skyline. But for decades, Mr. Pérez's tastes in art and architecture were largely shaped by his history and upbringing. He favored traditional paintings and sculptures by Latin American masters like Diego Rivera, Fernando Botero and Joaquín Torres Garcia. His primary house—a 10,000-square-foot, Venetian-style palazzo in Miami—similarly had an Old World feel.

"When I was young, I liked the English, antique-y, clubby kind of style," said Mr. Pérez. "I liked that dark-wood, leather-books feel."

But tastes change. Last year, Mr. Pérez announced that he was donating nearly his entire collection of Latin American art—worth about $20 million—and an additional cash gift of about $20 million to the Miami Art Museum, which will be renamed the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County. He restocked his collection with contemporary works, including a 16-foot-long canvas by dissident Cuban painter Joel Jover and photorealist works by the late Chilean artist Claudio Bravo.

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Sculptures by Francisco Zuniga, Lydia Azout and Fernando Botero are shown at the entrance of the palazzo.
Alexia Fodere for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Pérez also recently announced that he, his wife, Darlene, and their 9-year-old son, Felipe, would live part-time in an ultramodern condominium penthouse, currently in the design phase in Miami Beach, so they could be near the beach on weekends.

The unit Mr. Pérez is building for himself is a 3,200-square-foot, four-bedroom with an informal, beach-house look. Expected to be designed by Yabu Pushelberg, it is planned to have overstuffed white couches, light-colored woods and, of course, lots of art. The penthouse also has its own roof terrace and pool.

The unit is in his latest condo project, One Ocean, an eight-story luxury building across the causeway from downtown in Miami Beach's South-of-Fifth neighborhood. One Ocean is being designed by Mexican architect Enrique Norten—known for his smooth, metal exteriors and unusual forms—and resembles a wave breaking on the shoreline. Mr. Pérez's company says that 80% of the building's units are under contract, with prices ranging from $2 million to $10 million. In May, a penthouse condo at the Continuum, a building just a few hundred yards from One Ocean's site, set a Miami price record, selling for $25 million, though Mr. Pérez's unit would be unlikely to sell for that much because it is not on the waterfront.

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The family room in Mr. Pérez's Miami palazzo.
Alexia Fodere for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Pérez said it was his development work that eventually shifted his tastes. "As I started doing more condos in the last 10 years, and as I changed the way my home was, my heart was also changing. These days, I like younger, more contemporary things," he said. "My way of life has changed. Before, perhaps from insecurity, or my background, I was living in the ways I remembered."

In the early 1990s, Mr. Pérez was in early middle age, divorced and single, spending his days building nondescript rental apartments for middle-class Miamians. It was around this time he built his first house for himself: a mustard-yellow, Venetian-style palazzo on a small peninsula that juts out from a clutch of palm trees into Biscayne Bay. The six-bedroom, 10,000-square-foot home sits on a 1-acre lot with a 2-acre, attached sculpture garden—land once owned by Howard Hughes—in a gated community in Miami's bohemian enclave of Coconut Grove.

The home's exterior walls are covered in ivy that wraps from the front driveway to the stone pillars and keystone arches of the back patio. The land for the house was sold to Mr. Pérez for $1.2 million in 1994, according to public records, but Mr. Pérez says he doesn't remember how much it cost to build. Comparable-size homes in the same community are listed for around $12 million each.

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A rendering of a unit in One Ocean is shown.
Related Group

Inside, his home is full of antique Oriental rugs and traditional George Smith furniture. A Parisian lamp dangles above an antique billiards table, and an 18th-century, Colonial Mexican armoire was converted into a bar alongside a 1920s antique ice box and a table set with 1930s English country chairs. A Raj-era Indian wooden door separates the family room from the patio; a set of kitchen shelves is stocked with Mexican talavera pottery. Mr. Pérez's office is decorated in dark, Italian woodwork, and shelves of first editions line the walls around a traditional partner's desk.

As Mr. Pérez's business picked up, the Related Group, the company he had founded in 1979 with New York developer Stephen Ross, of Related Cos., became one of the pioneers of the type of luxe, steel-and-glass condominium towers that now define South Florida's real-estate market. Mr. Pérez started taking risks, using heavy loads of debt to finance his projects and getting burned in several high-profile deals during the downturn. He lost a lot of money on some of them, and had to hand over a few of his projects to his lenders. Now, with the worst of the bust behind him, Mr. Pérez has returned to building, with several projects in the works in Miami's Brickell neighborhood. Related Group has built 200 developments, with more than 80,000 units, the vast majority of them in Florida.

Mr. Pérez and his wife also have two other homes: One is a townhouse in a Park City, Utah, neighborhood where ski homes regularly sell for $1.5 million to $5 million; he skis there with his three adult children on winter vacations. He and his wife also own a penthouse in Punta del Este, Uruguay, where the family spends two weeks each year around New Years. "Punta del Este is like Southampton. All the most beautiful people are there," Ms. Pérez says. Gustavo Cao, of Sotheby's International Realty in Maldonado, estimates the unit's value at $1.7 million.

But Mr. Pérez hopes One Ocean, his Miami Beach condo project, will be the ultimate expression of his marriage of contemporary art and modern condo living. On a recent Friday night, he met with designers and Related employees to talk about where certain handpicked works of art would be placed in the building's sales center.

Mr. Pérez has lined up a cast of artists, many of them women, for his building: All the floors in the building's common areas will be done by Miami artist Michele Oka Doner; Uruguayan installation artist Ana Tiscornia is designing a huge wall sculpture for the lobby and Lydia Azout, a Colombian who makes highly geometric sculptures, will have a piece in the lobby.

"The art is very, very important," Mr. Pérez says. "It's very important to me when I bring people to my house, to say, 'This is my art.' "

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